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Charles Goodnight
Cowman and Plainsman
by J. Evetts Haley

When the author of this book, J. Evetts Haley, was a boy just learning the cattle business on a Texas Panhandle ranch, the stories he heard about Charles Goodnight were as much a part of the land as the trails the Goodnight herds had cut through its scanty grass. Fifteen years later Haley crossed the Goodnight ranch house yard “to face the flow of tobacco juice and profanity” – the beginning of a decade of interviews, travel and research, which resulted in this book.

Charlie Goodnight rode bareback from Illinois to Texas when he was nine years of age. He was hunting with the Caddo Indians beyond the frontier at 13, launching into the cattle business at 20, guiding Texas Rangers at 24, blazing cattle trails nearly 2,000 miles beyond the frontier at 40, and at 45 dominating nearly 20 million acres of range country in the interests of order. At 60 he was regarded as possibly the greatest scientific breeder of range cattle in the West, and at 90 he was an international authority on the range industry.

Goodnight knew the West of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Dick Wooton, St. Vrain and Lucien Maxwell. He ranged a country as vast as Bridger ranged. He rode with the boldness of Frèmont, guided by the craft of Carson. His vigorous zest for life enabled him to live intensely and amply, and in this book Haley, himself no stranger to the West, provides a fully readable and important Western biography, vividly told, thrilling, witty and completely authentic.

485 pages, paperback

$24.95
(#1486)